Remembering Helmut Martin

Martin, Helmut, and Jeffrey Kinkley, tr. and eds. Modern Chinese Writers : Self-Portrayals. Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992.

Sometimes a scholar can aggravate me to no end because they seem blind to something that I can see plainly, and yet I still would admit that I reaped ample rewards for reading them carefully. Helmut Martin is a good example with his introduction to Modern Chinese Writers : Self-Portrayals:

Helmut Martin (d. 1999 in Taiwan)

The repercussions after June 1989 prove that China had not really advanced beyond the stage of mere preconditions for creative freedom. Any literary historian of the period must still concentrate largely on the struggle between the writers' demands for autonomy and the constraints imposed on them by the prevailing cultural policy -- instead of exclusively following literary developments.

I don't agree. I think that above all, it is to literary developments that have to attend to understand what the Chinese readership is doing. Specifically literary techniques, like irony, express worlds of critique and mental action that Martin is unwilling or unable to appreciate. If Martin honestly thought that literature of the 1980s was nothing more than hackish "scar literature" or "cheap entertainment fiction," he is sadly mistaken, as work on Wang Shuo, Yu Hua, or Yang Jiang will show (note: this list under construction). No wonder critic C.D. Alison Bailey says that in Martin's list writers , "A sense of irony is a rare commodity as are modesty and an internationalist standpoint." This may be partly China's fault, but Martin's own stubborn focus on political dissidents also leaves us with this bias.

Apparently Martin resided in Taiwan and often published in Chinese (I'll just bet he was friends Yu Guangzhong). The link above to a few memorials dedicated him contains an immense amount of disturbing and touching information. It's a fitting memoir to a man who accomplished so much in the humanities, and was apparently a true teacher, despite suffering from chronic depression that eventually seems to have led him to commit suicide. I can't help but want to picture myself memorialized like this, with speeches from my Taiwanese friends, who will call me (in Taiwanese) a true friend of Taiwan.